The Complete Project Gutenberg Works of Galsworthy

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THE ENTIRE PROJECT GUTENBERG GALSWORTHY FILES



The Forsyte Saga:
Volume 1. The Man of Property
Volume 2. Indian Summer of a Forsyte
In Chancery
Volume 3. Awakening
To Let
Other Novels:
The Dark Flower
The Freelands
Beyond
Villa Rubein and Other Stories
Villa Rubein
A Man of Devon
A Knight
Salvation of a Forsyte
The Silence
Saint's Progress
The Island Pharisees
The Country House
Fraternity
The Patrician
The Burning Spear
Five Short Tales
The First and Last
A Stoic
The Apple Tree
The Juryman
Indian Summer of a Forsyte
Essays and Studies:
Concerning Life
Inn of Tranquility
Magpie over the Hill
Sheep-shearing
Evolution
Riding in the Mist
The Procession
A Christian
Wind in the Rocks
My Distant Relative
The Black Godmother
Quality
The Grand Jury
Gone
Threshing
That Old-time Place
Romance--three Gleams
Memories
Felicity
Concerning Letters
A Novelist's Allegory
Some Platitudes Concerning Drama
Meditation on Finality
Wanted--Schooling
On Our Dislike of Things as They Are
The Windlestraw
About Censorship
Vague Thoughts on Art
Plays:
First Series:
The Silver Box
Joy
Strife
Second Series:
The Eldest Son
The Little Dream
Justice
Third Series:
The Fugitive
The Pigeon
The Mob
Fourth Series:
A Bit O' Love
The Foundations
The Skin Game
Six Short Plays:
The First and The Last
The Little Man
Hall-marked
Defeat
The Sun
Punch and Go
Fifth Series:
A Family Man
Loyalties
Windows





[NOTE: The spelling conforms to the original: "s's" instead of our
"z's"; and "c's" where we would have "s's"; and "...our" as in colour
and flavour; many interesting double consonants; etc.]




FORSYTE SAGA

Complete


By John Galsworthy



Contents:
Part 1. The Man of Property
Part 2. Indian Summer of a Forsyte
In Chancery
Part 3. Awakening
To Let




THE MAN OF PROPERTY



TO MY WIFE:

I DEDICATE THE FORSYTE SAGA IN ITS ENTIRETY,
BELIEVING IT TO BE OF ALL MY WORKS THE LEAST
UNWORTHY OF ONE WITHOUT WHOSE ENCOURAGEMENT,
SYMPATHY AND CRITICISM I COULD NEVER HAVE
BECOME EVEN SUCH A WRITER AS I AM.




PREFACE:

"The Forsyte Saga" was the title originally destined for that part of it
which is called "The Man of Property"; and to adopt it for the collected
chronicles of the Forsyte family has indulged the Forsytean tenacity that
is in all of us. The word Saga might be objected to on the ground that
it connotes the heroic and that there is little heroism in these pages.
But it is used with a suitable irony; and, after all, this long tale,
though it may deal with folk in frock coats, furbelows, and a gilt-edged
period, is not devoid of the essential heat of conflict. Discounting for
the gigantic stature and blood-thirstiness of old days, as they have come
down to us in fairy-tale and legend, the folk of the old Sagas were
Forsytes, assuredly, in their possessive instincts, and as little proof
against the inroads of beauty and passion as Swithin, Soames, or even
Young Jolyon. And if heroic figures, in days that never were, seem to
startle out from their surroundings in fashion unbecoming to a Forsyte of
the Victorian era, we may be sure that tribal instinct was even then the
prime force, and that "family" and the sense of home and property counted
as they do to this day, for all the recent efforts to "talk them out."

So many people have written and claimed that their families were the
originals of the Forsytes that one has been almost encouraged to believe
in the typicality of an imagined species. Manners change and modes
evolve, and "Timothy's on the Bayswater Road" becomes a nest of the
unbelievable in all except essentials; we shall not look upon its like
again, nor perhaps on such a one as James or Old Jolyon. And yet the
figures of Insurance Societies and the utterances of Judges reassure us
daily that our earthly paradise is still a rich preserve, where the wild
raiders, Beauty and Passion, come stealing in, filching security from
beneath our noses. As surely as a dog will bark at a brass band, so will
the essential Soames in human nature ever rise up uneasily against the
dissolution which hovers round the folds of ownership.

"Let the dead Past bury its dead" would be a better saying if the Past
ever died. The persistence of the Past is one of those tragi-comic
blessings which each new age denies, coming cocksure on to the stage to
mouth its claim to a perfect novelty.

But no Age is so new as that! Human Nature, under its changing
pretensions and clothes, is and ever will be very much of a Forsyte, and
might, after all, be a much worse animal.

Looking back on the Victorian era, whose ripeness, decline, and 'fall-of'
is in some sort pictured in "The Forsyte Saga," we see now that we have
but jumped out of a frying-pan into a fire. It would be difficult to
substantiate a claim that the case of England was better in 1913 than it
was in 1886, when the Forsytes assembled at Old Jolyon's to celebrate the
engagement of June to Philip Bosinney. And in 1920, when again the clan
gathered to bless the marriage of Fleur with Michael Mont, the state of
England is as surely too molten and bankrupt as in the eighties it was
too congealed and low-percented. If these chronicles had been a really
scientific study of transition one would have dwelt probably on such
factors as the invention of bicycle, motor-car, and flying-machine; the
arrival of a cheap Press; the decline of country life and increase of the
towns; the birth of the Cinema. Men are, in fact, quite unable to control
their own inventions; they at best develop adaptability to the new
conditions those inventions create.

But this long tale is no scientific study of a period; it is rather an
intimate incarnation of the disturbance that Beauty effects in the lives
of men.

The figure of Irene, never, as the reader may possibly have observed,
present, except through the senses of other characters, is a concretion
of disturbing Beauty impinging on a possessive world.

One has noticed that readers, as they wade on through the salt waters of
the Saga, are inclined more and more to pity Soames, and to think that in
doing so they are in revolt against the mood of his creator. Far from
it! He, too, pities Soames, the tragedy of whose life is the very
simple, uncontrollable tragedy of being unlovable, without quite a thick
enough skin to be thoroughly unconscious of the fact. Not even Fleur
loves Soames as he feels he ought to be loved. But in pitying Soames,
readers incline, perhaps, to animus against Irene: After all, they think,
he wasn't a bad fellow, it wasn't his fault; she ought to have forgiven
him, and so on!

And, taking sides, they lose perception of the simple truth, which
underlies the whole story, that where sex attraction is utterly and
definitely lacking in one partner to a union, no amount of pity, or
reason, or duty, or what not, can overcome a repulsion implicit in
Nature. Whether it ought to, or no, is beside the point; because in fact
it never does. And where Irene seems hard and cruel, as in the Bois de
Boulogne, or the Goupenor Gallery, she is but wisely realistic--knowing
that the least concession is the inch which precedes the impossible, the
repulsive ell.

A criticism one might pass on the last phase of the Saga is the complaint
that Irene and Jolyon those rebels against property--claim spiritual
property in their son Jon. But it would be hypercriticism, as the tale
is told. No father and mother could have let the boy marry Fleur without
knowledge of the facts; and the facts determine Jon, not the persuasion
of his parents. Moreover, Jolyon's persuasion is not on his own account,
but on Irene's, and Irene's persuasion becomes a reiterated: "Don't think
of me, think of yourself!" That Jon, knowing the facts, can realise his
mother's feelings, will hardly with justice be held proof that she is,
after all, a Forsyte.

But though the impingement of Beauty and the claims of Freedom on a
possessive world are the main prepossessions of the Forsyte Saga, it
cannot be absolved from the charge of embalming the upper-middle class.
As the old Egyptians placed around their mummies the necessaries of a
future existence, so I have endeavoured to lay beside the, figures of
Aunts Ann and Juley and Hester, of Timothy and Swithin, of Old Jolyon and
James, and of their sons, that which shall guarantee them a little life
here-after, a little balm in the hurried Gilead of a dissolving
"Progress."

If the upper-middle class, with other classes, is destined to "move on"
into amorphism, here, pickled in these pages, it lies under glass for
strollers in the wide and ill-arranged museum of Letters. Here it rests,
preserved in its own juice: The Sense of Property.
1922.




THE MAN OF PROPERTY

by JOHN GALSWORTHY




"........ You will answer
The slaves are ours ....."

--Merchant of Venice.




TO EDWARD GARNETT




PART I




CHAPTER I

'AT HOME' AT OLD JOLYON'S

Those privileged to be present at a family festival of the Forsytes have
seen that charming and instructive sight--an upper middle-class family in
full plumage. But whosoever of these favoured persons has possessed the
gift of psychological analysis (a talent without monetary value and
properly ignored by the Forsytes), has witnessed a spectacle, not only
delightful in itself, but illustrative of an obscure human problem. In
plainer words, he has gleaned from a gathering of this family--no branch
of which had a liking for the other, between no three members of whom
existed anything worthy of the name of sympathy--evidence of that
mysterious concrete tenacity which renders a family so formidable a unit
of society, so clear a reproduction of society in miniature. He has been
admitted to a vision of the dim roads of social progress, has understood
something of patriarchal life, of the swarmings of savage hordes, of the
rise and fall of nations. He is like one who, having watched a tree grow
from its planting--a paragon of tenacity, insulation, and success, amidst
the deaths of a hundred other plants less fibrous, sappy, and
persistent--one day will see it flourishing with bland, full foliage, in
an almost repugnant prosperity, at the summit of its efflorescence.

On June 15, eighteen eighty-six, about four of the afternoon, the
observer who chanced to be present at the house of old Jolyon Forsyte in
Stanhope Gate, might have seen the highest efflorescence of the Forsytes.

This was the occasion of an 'at home' to celebrate the engagement of Miss
June Forsyte, old Jolyon's granddaughter, to Mr. Philip Bosinney. In the
bravery of light gloves, buff waistcoats, feathers and frocks, the family
were present, even Aunt Ann, who now but seldom left the corner of her
brother Timothy's green drawing-room, where, under the aegis of a plume
of dyed pampas grass in a light blue vase, she sat all day reading and
knitting, surrounded by the effigies of three generations of Forsytes.
Even Aunt Ann was there; her inflexible back, and the dignity of her calm
old face personifying the rigid possessiveness of the family idea.

When a Forsyte was engaged, married, or born, the Forsytes were present;
when a Forsyte died--but no Forsyte had as yet died; they did not die;
death being contrary to their principles, they took precautions against
it, the instinctive precautions of highly vitalized persons who resent
encroachments on their property.

About the Forsytes mingling that day with the crowd of other guests,
there was a more than ordinarily groomed look, an alert, inquisitive
assurance, a brilliant respectability, as though they were attired in
defiance of something. The habitual sniff on the face of Soames Forsyte
had spread through their ranks; they were on their guard.

The subconscious offensiveness of their attitude has constituted old
Jolyon's 'home' the psychological moment of the family history, made it
the prelude of their drama.

The Forsytes were resentful of something, not individually, but as a
family; this resentment expressed itself in an added perfection of
raiment, an exuberance of family cordiality, an exaggeration of family
importance, and--the sniff. Danger--so indispensable in bringing out the
fundamental quality of any society, group, or individual--was what the
Forsytes scented; the premonition of danger put a burnish on their
armour. For the first time, as a family, they appeared to have an
instinct of being in contact, with some strange and unsafe thing.

Over against the piano a man of bulk and stature was wearing two
waistcoats on his wide chest, two waistcoats and a ruby pin, instead of
the single satin waistcoat and diamond pin of more usual occasions, and
his shaven, square, old face, the colour of pale leather, with pale eyes,
had its most dignified look, above his satin stock. This was Swithin
Forsyte. Close to the window, where he could get more than his fair
share of fresh air, the other twin, James--the fat and the lean of it,
old Jolyon called these brothers--like the bulky Swithin, over six feet
in height, but very lean, as though destined from his birth to strike a
balance and maintain an average, brooded over the scene with his
permanent stoop; his grey eyes had an air of fixed absorption in some
secret worry, broken at intervals by a rapid, shifting scrutiny of
surrounding facts; his cheeks, thinned by two parallel folds, and a long,
clean-shaven upper lip, were framed within Dundreary whiskers. In his
hands he turned and turned a piece of china. Not far off, listening to a
lady in brown, his only son Soames, pale and well-shaved, dark-haired,
rather bald, had poked his chin up sideways, carrying his nose with that
aforesaid appearance of 'sniff,' as though despising an egg which he knew
he could not digest. Behind him his cousin, the tall George, son of the
fifth Forsyte, Roger, had a Quilpish look on his fleshy face, pondering
one of his sardonic jests. Something inherent to the occasion had
affected them all.

Seated in a row close to one another were three ladies--Aunts Ann,
Hester (the two Forsyte maids), and Juley (short for Julia), who not in
first youth had so far forgotten herself as to marry Septimus Small, a
man of poor constitution. She had survived him for many years. With her
elder and younger sister she lived now in the house of Timothy, her sixth
and youngest brother, on the Bayswater Road. Each of these ladies held
fans in their hands, and each with some touch of colour, some emphatic
feather or brooch, testified to the solemnity of the opportunity.

In the centre of the room, under the chandelier, as became a host, stood
the head of the family, old Jolyon himself. Eighty years of age, with
his fine, white hair, his dome-like forehead, his little, dark grey eyes,
and an immense white moustache, which drooped and spread below the level
of his strong jaw, he had a patriarchal look, and in spite of lean cheeks
and hollows at his temples, seemed master of perennial youth. He held
himself extremely upright, and his shrewd, steady eyes had lost none of
their clear shining. Thus he gave an impression of superiority to the
doubts and dislikes of smaller men. Having had his own way for
innumerable years, he had earned a prescriptive right to it. It would
never have occurred to old Jolyon that it was necessary to wear a look of
doubt or of defiance.

Between him and the four other brothers who were present, James, Swithin,
Nicholas, and Roger, there was much difference, much similarity. In
turn, each of these four brothers was very different from the other, yet
they, too, were alike.

Through the varying features and expression of those five faces could be
marked a certain steadfastness of chin, underlying surface distinctions,
marking a racial stamp, too prehistoric to trace, too remote and
permanent to discuss--the very hall-mark and guarantee of the family
fortunes.

Among the younger generation, in the tall, bull-like George, in pallid
strenuous Archibald, in young Nicholas with his sweet and tentative
obstinacy, in the grave and foppishly determined Eustace, there was this
same stamp--less meaningful perhaps, but unmistakable--a sign of
something ineradicable in the family soul. At one time or another during
the afternoon, all these faces, so dissimilar and so alike, had worn an
expression of distrust, the object of which was undoubtedly the man whose
acquaintance they were thus assembled to make. Philip Bosinney was known
to be a young man without fortune, but Forsyte girls had become engaged
to such before, and had actually married them. It was not altogether for
this reason, therefore, that the minds of the Forsytes misgave them.
They could not have explained the origin of a misgiving obscured by the
mist of family gossip. A story was undoubtedly told that he had paid his
duty call to Aunts Ann, Juley, and Hester, in a soft grey hat--a soft
grey hat, not even a new one--a dusty thing with a shapeless crown. "So,
extraordinary, my dear--so odd," Aunt Hester, passing through the little,
dark hall (she was rather short-sighted), had tried to 'shoo' it off a
chair, taking it for a strange, disreputable cat--Tommy had such
disgraceful friends! She was disturbed when it did not move.

Like an artist for ever seeking to discover the significant trifle which
embodies the whole character of a scene, or place, or person, so those
unconscious artists--the Forsytes had fastened by intuition on this hat;
it was their significant trifle, the detail in which was embedded the
meaning of the whole matter; for each had asked himself: "Come, now,
should I have paid that visit in that hat?" and each had answered "No!"
and some, with more imagination than others, had added: "It would never
have come into my head!"

George, on hearing the story, grinned. The hat had obviously been worn
as a practical joke! He himself was a connoisseur of such. "Very
haughty!" he said, "the wild Buccaneer."

And this mot, the 'Buccaneer,' was bandied from mouth to mouth, till it
became the favourite mode of alluding to Bosinney.

Her aunts reproached June afterwards about the hat.

"We don't think you ought to let him, dear!" they had said.

June had answered in her imperious brisk way, like the little embodiment
of will she was: "Oh! what does it matter? Phil never knows what he's
got on!"

No one had credited an answer so outrageous. A man not to know what he
had on? No, no! What indeed was this young man, who, in becoming
engaged to June, old Jolyon's acknowledged heiress, had done so well for
himself? He was an architect, not in itself a sufficient reason for
wearing such a hat. None of the Forsytes happened to be architects, but
one of them knew two architects who would never have worn such a hat upon
a call of ceremony in the London season.

Dangerous--ah, dangerous! June, of course, had not seen this, but,
though not yet nineteen, she was notorious. Had she not said to Mrs.
Soames--who was always so beautifully dressed--that feathers were vulgar?
Mrs. Soames had actually given up wearing feathers, so dreadfully
downright was dear June!

These misgivings, this disapproval, and perfectly genuine distrust, did
not prevent the Forsytes from gathering to old Jolyon's invitation. An
'At Home' at Stanhope Gate was a great rarity; none had been held for
twelve years, not indeed, since old Mrs. Jolyon had died.

Never had there been so full an assembly, for, mysteriously united in
spite of all their differences, they had taken arms against a common
peril. Like cattle when a dog comes into the field, they stood head to
head and shoulder to shoulder, prepared to run upon and trample the
invader to death. They had come, too, no doubt, to get some notion of
what sort of presents they would ultimately be expected to give; for
though the question of wedding gifts was usually graduated in this way:
'What are you givin'? Nicholas is givin' spoons!'--so very much depended
on the bridegroom. If he were sleek, well-brushed, prosperous-looking,
it was more necessary to give him nice things; he would expect them. In
the end each gave exactly what was right and proper, by a species of
family adjustment arrived at as prices are arrived at on the Stock
Exchange--the exact niceties being regulated at Timothy's commodious,
red-brick residence in Bayswater, overlooking the Park, where dwelt Aunts
Ann, Juley, and Hester.

The uneasiness of the Forsyte family has been justified by the simple
mention of the hat. How impossible and wrong would it have been for any
family, with the regard for appearances which should ever characterize
the great upper middle-class, to feel otherwise than uneasy!

The author of the uneasiness stood talking to June by the further door;
his curly hair had a rumpled appearance, as though he found what was
going on around him unusual. He had an air, too, of having a joke all to
himself. George, speaking aside to his brother, Eustace, said:

"Looks as if he might make a bolt of it--the dashing Buccaneer!"

This 'very singular-looking man,' as Mrs. Small afterwards called him,
was of medium height and strong build, with a pale, brown face, a
dust-coloured moustache, very prominent cheek-bones, and hollow checks.
His forehead sloped back towards the crown of his head, and bulged out in
bumps over the eyes, like foreheads seen in the Lion-house at the Zoo.
He had sherry-coloured eyes, disconcertingly inattentive at times. Old
Jolyon's coachman, after driving June and Bosinney to the theatre, had
remarked to the butler:

"I dunno what to make of 'im. Looks to me for all the world like an
'alf-tame leopard." And every now and then a Forsyte would come up, sidle
round, and take a look at him.

June stood in front, fending off this idle curiosity--a little bit of a
thing, as somebody once said, 'all hair and spirit,' with fearless blue
eyes, a firm jaw, and a bright colour, whose face and body seemed too
slender for her crown of red-gold hair.

A tall woman, with a beautiful figure, which some member of the family
had once compared to a heathen goddess, stood looking at these two with a
shadowy smile.

Her hands, gloved in French grey, were crossed one over the other, her
grave, charming face held to one side, and the eyes of all men near were
fastened on it. Her figure swayed, so balanced that the very air seemed
to set it moving. There was warmth, but little colour, in her cheeks;
her large, dark eyes were soft.

But it was at her lips--asking a question, giving an answer, with that
shadowy smile--that men looked; they were sensitive lips, sensuous and
sweet, and through them seemed to come warmth and perfume like the warmth
and perfume of a flower.

The engaged couple thus scrutinized were unconscious of this passive
goddess. It was Bosinney who first noticed her, and asked her name.

June took her lover up to the woman with the beautiful figure.

"Irene is my greatest chum," she said: "Please be good friends, you two!"

At the little lady's command they all three smiled; and while they were
smiling, Soames Forsyte, silently appearing from behind the woman with
the beautiful figure, who was his wife, said:

"Ah! introduce me too!"

He was seldom, indeed, far from Irene's side at public functions, and
even when separated by the exigencies of social intercourse, could be
seen following her about with his eyes, in which were strange expressions
of watchfulness and longing.

At the window his father, James, was still scrutinizing the marks on the
piece of china.

"I wonder at Jolyon's allowing this engagement," he said to Aunt Ann.
"They tell me there's no chance of their getting married for years. This
young Bosinney" (he made the word a dactyl in opposition to general usage
of a short o) "has got nothing. When Winifred married Dartie, I made him
bring every penny into settlement--lucky thing, too--they'd ha' had
nothing by this time!"

Aunt Ann looked up from her velvet chair. Grey curls banded her
forehead, curls that, unchanged for decades, had extinguished in the
family all sense of time. She made no reply, for she rarely spoke,
husbanding her aged voice; but to James, uneasy of conscience, her look
was as good as an answer.

"Well," he said, "I couldn't help Irene's having no money. Soames was in
such a hurry; he got quite thin dancing attendance on her."